27 February 2017 16:11

Imagine an environment so submerged, tangled and lost it can only be visited by scuba divers.

21st century objects – clothes, cars, bicycles – are silted down to become future fossils and archaeology.

In reality, scenes like these are far in the future but for a Lancaster University academic they are very much in the present.

Artist Gerry Davies, a senior lecturer at Lancaster University who makes and writes about drawing, was shortlisted for the prestigious Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2016.

His exhibition, Flood Story, which opens at Drawing Projects UK’s Trowbridge gallery on March 9, takes speculative thinking about global warming and rising sea levels to extremes.

The twelve drawings are created in a silvery mix of graphite and varnish and depict interiors, villages, towns and cities, smashed and flooded by rising sea levels.

“For us today, inundations on this scale are in the far future, yet when viewing these drawings, the feeling is of looking back into history and a record of the past,” says Gerry Davies. “Through this sense of a shift in time the drawings suggest we, and the divers, have been transported forward in time to look back at the remains of our environmental folly.”

The 26-page illustrated catalogue, supported by Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts and Lancaster University, includes a new essay by Professor Nigel Clark, of Lancaster Environment Centre and a foreword by Professor Anita Taylor, Director of Jerwood Drawing Prize and founder of Drawing Projects UK.

The exhibition runs until April 1.